The present invention relates generally to the connection of elements which are made of structural foam, and in particular to a connector for effecting such a connection.
Elements made of "structural foam" are becoming increasingly more popular. The term "structural foam" refers to synthetic plastic foam material of the rigid or near-rigid type, of which the material available under the tradename "Styrofoam" is an example.
One area where this particular type of structural foam-element, so-called because it is possible to make structures of it, such as building elements and the like, is in wide use, and with respect to which the invention will hereafter be explained, is in the toy industry. The use of structural foam materials to simulate landscapes, buildings and the like, is widely customary in the toy industry in recent years. When it was necessary heretofore to connect such elements with one another, this was done by means of an adhesive. However, especially in the case of toy structures it is usually desired that a playing child be able to disassemble the elements repeatedly, so that they may be reassembled in many ways according to the child's particular wishes and imagination. The difficulty with this has always been heretofore that if two of these structural-foam elements are connected by means of an adhesive, they cannot subsequently be separated without doing damage to them. For example, if several structural elements have been adhesively connected to make up a simulated landscape arrangement, they cannot be later separated, for instance by detaching a mountain from a base to move it to another location. It is self-evident that under these circumstances a child will either quite rapidly lose interest since it is not possible to convert the set-up from one arrangement to another one, or that it is necessary to supply the child with an extremely large number of different structural elements made of foam material, so that every time the child wishes to change around the arrangement but cannot do so because the previously employed structural-foam elements are adhesively connected together, he can erect a new arrangement by using new structural-foam elements. It is evident that neither of these two solutions is satisfactory.